Moving Back to the Cairngorms: Finding Home and Inspiration in the Scottish Highlands

I moved back to the Cairngorms this summer and if you'd told me a decade ago I'd end up here again, I'm not sure I'd have believed you. My twenties took me from small Perthshire villages to Glasgow, where ten years turned into a whole chapter of my life. Then Aviemore, and a pub I co-owned for a decade, right in the heart of these hills. Then Glasgow again, for eight more years. Now, at last, I'm back.

So this isn't a new place to me, it's somewhere I've already called home once before. And I think that's part of why this move feels different to the moves that came before it.

Glasgow gave me a lot, across both stretches of time there. The energy of the city, the people, that particular kind of vibrancy you only get somewhere with so much creativity packed into it. I don't say any of this lightly. I loved my time there and I still miss parts of it. But there's something about coming back to the Cairngorms specifically, a place I've already called home once before, that I wasn't quite prepared for.

In those first few weeks back this summer, I found myself genuinely stopping mid-walk, struck by how grounded I felt, simply from being immersed in the landscape again, by that particular quality of light, by the quiet. It wasn't nostalgia exactly. It was more like something settling, somewhere I already knew how to belong to.

My evening walks now look a bit like this.

Looking back, I find it fitting that almost all of my collections to date, Cairngorm, Seagrass, Findhorn, Birch, were designed during my last Glasgow stretch. At the time, I just knew I was drawn to the outdoors, to landscape, to texture and colour pulled from nature. Now that I'm back here, I understand a little better where that pull was really coming from, a happy childhood spent in small, rural Perthshire villages and a decade spent living in the Cairngorms.

I'm a ceramic artist based in the Cairngorms, in the Scottish Highlands, making handmade, functional stoneware pottery, mugs, vases, tableware, pieces designed for everyday use. What I'm trying to capture in clay isn't the landscape itself. It's the feeling. The identity of being from somewhere and the way memory and place tangle together until you can't quite separate them.

Elbow-deep in clay, most days of the week.

You can see it most clearly in the Cairngorm collection, a crawl glaze that fractures across black stoneware, mimicking the first thaw of snow each spring, that exact moment when winter starts to loosen its grip. Or in Birch, built around the trees that have always caught my eye here, their pale bark breaking through raw, unglazed clay.

Cairngorm tumblers fresh out of the kiln.

Being back here has also made me curious about what comes next. For years I've been making work inspired by the Highlands from a distance. Now I'm living within that landscape again, noticing its smaller shifts from day to day; the changing light, weather, colour and texture, and the way familiar places alter through the seasons.

I don't yet know exactly how that will find its way into the work and I rather like that. For now, I'm giving myself space to look more closely, experiment with materials and surfaces, and explore what it means to make work that is not simply inspired by a landscape, but made from within it.

If you're ever passing through Carrbridge, my studio door is open. I'd love to show you around.